Recruiting

[RaginCajun]

So I know you have to capture a person (good or bad) in order to try to recruit them to your group.

How many opportunities does your warden have to attempt to recruit them before you shouldn't waste your time any more?  Just one and done?  Trying to figure out whether to release my prisoner or not.  The first attempt failed and now no options are showing up when I click on the prisoner.

[Calistyn]

You basically have infinite opportunities - your warden will continue to try recruiting prisoners as long as you have them. You won't need to keep telling them to do it either, it's automatic as long as you've set them to be recruited.

[BlackSmokeDMax]

So I know you have to capture a person (good or bad) in order to try to recruit them to your group.

How many opportunities does your warden have to attempt to recruit them before you shouldn't waste your time any more?  Just one and done?  Trying to figure out whether to release my prisoner or not.  The first attempt failed and now no options are showing up when I click on the prisoner.

On the tab where you choose to try to recruit them or not, there will be a percentage chance of recruitment. 99 is I think as bad as it gets, and ends up being like a 0.5 % chance to recruit each time.

Your colonists can try to recruit each prisoner a max of once per day. So from there it is up to you how much effort in both time and food you want to put into that specific prisoner.

If you want to train your social and have the extra food, keeping a 99 prisoner around for just training is a good thing though.

[Calahan]

Your colonists can try to recruit each prisoner a max of once per day.

Are you using a mod? Since I'm playing vanilla and recruitment attempts are not limited to once per day.

I didn't play A13 much, but in A12d it was one attempt about every 8 hours (so changing that to once per day would be a big change, as it would be on top of the change to day lengths that occurred in A13).

[Mutineer]

I believe it is about 8 hours, never measure execly. I am sure if you try in morning you will be able to do in the evening and then next morning.

[Blastoderm]

I doubt you can level social in that way as skill degrades more than you level it in a day

[Shurp]

When you look at your prisoner tab, if recruitment difficulty is less than 90% you have a realistic chance of recruiting them sometime in the next season or so.  higher than that is rarely worth bothering with unless you have a great Social skill.

Does limiting prisoners to Friendly Chat improve social skill?  it seems like it should use the attribute but I never checked.

Be careful not to keep too many prisoners around.  They could be hard to handle in the Prison Break event.

[cultist]

I doubt you can level social in that way as skill degrades more than you level it in a day

Skill only degrades at high levels (12+ I think)

[Shurp]

Just verified: chatting with prisoners does improve social skill.  So always keep a few prisoners around, and keep any weapons far from them

[stigma]

You can keep trying as much as you want, but some prisoners will be VERY hard to convince even with a very good warden.
Playing as the classic 3 survivors you will have serious issues convincing tribal members you capture (thankfully pirates are more common and easier).

You can find the difficulty in the prisoner menu I believe  - and I think it also pops up when you observe a recruit attempt. Use those numbers to figure out if it is worth trying to recruit the or if you are wasting your time (but it is never 0% as far as I know).

Playing as the lost tribe however I find that everyone(?) you capture is basically as hard as a tribal would be for regular colonists. I'm not sure if this is by design, but it makes recruiting anyone extreemely hard. Made a post about this here, as I love the tribal start but I'm not sure how to deal with this in the long-term...
https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=22060.0

-Stigma

[pconners]

When your character completes his recruitment task the % chance of success floats up in small text on the screen near the prisoner. It obviously corresponds to the prisoner's recruitment difficulty and your social skill, but I don't know what the formula is. As others have noted, if you're playing the standard colony start and trying to recruit tribesmen, your % chance will be 1% or less. It gets rolled a couple (2?) of times a day though and doesn't take much effort - so if you have the space/resources its worthwhile.